


Summit

by choomchoom



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mountaineering, Storms, none of this would have happened if either of them had any sense of self preservation, proper and improper use of ice climbing tools
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-11
Updated: 2018-03-11
Packaged: 2019-03-30 01:16:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13939431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/choomchoom/pseuds/choomchoom
Summary: Drift and Rodimus take a trip to visit a temple on the other side of Troja Major during the events of LL 8 and 9. There's a lot they need to talk about, and a dangerous adventure may just be the best place for it.





	Summit

**Author's Note:**

> This is what happens when you're snowboarding and think about how there really aren't many tf person-vs-nature fics, and then think 'haha rodimus would hate snowy mountains' and then that thought collides with the vague 'maybe i should write a driftrod fic' thoughts you'd been batting around for weeks. 
> 
> hope you enjoy!

“Captain, I have a request.”

Rodimus looked up from where he’d been scratching a drawing into a defunct datapad. He’d started on the pursuit hoping for some more magic matrix drawings, so that maybe they could hit Cyberutopia before Getaway and really show him, but all that he’d managed to draw so far was a terrible rendition of the Rodpod (bless its soul) and a vague pattern of circles that were very much not a map to Cyberutopia.

He looked up at Drift, who had spoken. Drift had one hand on a sword, tapping his fingers on it with what could have been mistaken for nerves if he were a different mech. “What’s up?” Rodimus asked.

“I heard that we’re stopping at Troja Major,” Drift started.

“Uh-huh. Nautica made a very convincing case about how it could make or break our mission, complete with a lot of math that i didn’t understand but implicitly trust. So, yeah. Forty-eight hours,” Rodimus said. He made another pointless squiggly line through one of the circles in his drawing and then looked up. “What is it you want?”

“I’d like permission to undertake a mission of my own while the ship is at Troja Major,” Drift said. “There’s a Spectralist temple at the top of one of the Howling Mountains on the far side of the planet. I’d like to vis—”

“That’s a great idea!” Rodimus was standing now, the datapad having clattered to the floor. “Let’s do it! When do we leave?”

Drift’s optics narrowed, then they returned to normal and he shrugged. “There’s transports from the town Nautica and Anode need to be in. I figured I—uh, we’d leave from there.”

“Great!” Rodimus was much more enthusiastic about the detour now.

“Are you sure you’re up for this? It’s a hard climb and the weather isn’t going to be the best. Plus it’s on the far side of a tidally locked planet, so it’s always dark.”

“Absolutely!” Rodimus said, before what Drift had said actually registered. The conditions he was describing sounded pretty awful, actually. But he’d committed himself. No way was he saying no now.

—

“The far side? In this season? Drift, no. Aren’t there other temples in locations less likely to _kill you_?” Ratchet ranted without even looking at Drift, busy with organizing supplies in what passed for a cramped Medibay aboard Skip.

“Not in this region of space there aren’t!” Drift blurted out, instead of one of the more sensible responses that he was sure he could have called up if he was talking to pretty much any other person.

“And I assume you’re going alone?” Ratchet grumbled.

“No. With Rodimus, apparently,” Drift said.

Ratchet stopped organizing to glance over at Drift, skepticism written on his face. “Apparently?” he parroted.

Drift shrugged. “I tried to ask permission to go and he invited himself.”

Ratchet nodded, and Drift waited for the expected pithy comment about Rodimus’s impulsivity. “Good,” Ratchet said instead, nodding.

“Good?”

“Good. You’re not going alone, and the two of you are gonna have some time to talk to each other like civilized beings. Though,” he cocked his head. “I dunno. Maybe that thing where you build on each other’s bad ideas will happen and you’ll both end up dead. I did not go to all that effort of bringing you back for you to end up dead, you hear?”

Drift sighed. “I’ll do my best not to end up dead.”

Velocity breezed in, clearly seeking Ratchet, and Drift turned to go.

“You make that happen. And talk to him!” Ratchet shouted at his back.

—

It was incredible to be off the ship. Rodimus relished every second that he was walking around, stretching his limbs, soaking up the sunlight as Drift led him to the transport center.

It wasn’t until Drift had bought them tickets that Rodimus realized he hadn’t looked at the map once. “Have you been here before?” he asked as they climbed aboard the shuttle that would take them to the far side.

Drift took a seat on the transport, avoiding Rodimus’s optics. Rodimus was on the verge of prodding him when he finally responded. “Once,” was all he said.

There was something in his tone that made Rodimus want to push deeper. “When?” he asked.

Drift shrugged as if to clear tension and then said, “After I was banished.”

Rodimus wasn’t sure what to say to that. This wasn’t like their old conversations, which had always been so personal and engaging and fun, even when the subject matter turned dark. They had used to talk about belief, and war, and leadership, always just across the line of too personal for late-shift conversations between mechs who had only served together for a few months. Rodimus had loved those times, and hadn’t even realized how much he would miss them until Drift was gone.

He was starting to realize that things might never be so easy again. There was history between them now, a fault line in both their lives that couldn’t be erased. He hated it, but even he had no idea what to do about it.

But that didn’t mean he couldn’t try. “Did you visit this temple then?” he asked.

Drift smiled softly at that. _Winning_. “Yeah,” he said. He turned to look right at Rodimus, blue optics shining and complementing his new paint job. “I think you’ll love it,” he said. “Even though you’re going to hate the journey.”

“You keep saying that,” Rodimus said. “It’s been fine so far!”

Drift smirked at Rodimus’s petulant tone, then faced forward. Out the front window of the transport, it looked like they were driving away from a sunset. “I give it two hours.”

An hour and forty-five minutes later, they had exited the transport in the dark, rented a bunch of equipment that Rodimus didn’t remember the names of (and ice axes. He remembered what ice axes were called because that was an awesome name), and reached the base of the mountain that the temple was allegedly atop. Allegedly because in the darkness, Rodimus couldn’t see that far up.

Drift stopped walking, slightly ahead of Rodimus. “We should put on crampons here. It’s starting to get steep.”

Drift attached his own easily and then helped Rodimus through the process. The look of the spikes on his feet was kinda cool, kinda unsettling. He couldn’t even see them once he stood up and his feet sunk into the snow, though, so he decided to ignore them.

“You wanna walk with your legs a little wider than usual, like this,” Drift said, demonstrating. His stance was wide, but his movements were somehow still graceful as he picked his way across the snow.

Rodimus mimicked him for a few steps, laughing a little at the awkwardness. “This is gonna take all night this way,” he said.

“You’ll get used to it.” They’d reached a steeper slope, where a path wove upwards onto the mountain before disappearing into the windy dark. Drift turned back to Rodimus and gestured towards it. “You wanna go first?”

“Always.” Rodimus stepped forward and put one spiky foot on the steeper snow and ice. The spikes sank in, giving him more stability than he expected.

“If you need extra leverage use the—“

“Ice axes!” Rodimus just wanted to say it. “Got it.”

It was slow going at first, frustratingly so. The cold didn’t help, nor the darkness, nor the wind that at its worst felt like it might start an avalanche and throw both of them right off the mountain.

Soon enough, Rodimus slipped off the trail despite the spikes and smashed into a block of ice below him. Groaning, he stood up and took stock of himself: tired, cold, covered in snow, but uninjured. Drift had stopped in his tracks, and was extending one of his tools out so that Rodimus could grab hold of it. With Drift’s help, Rodimus hauled himself back up onto the trail.

“Ugh. Why did it have to be _cold_ and why did it have to be _steep_?” Rodimus asked in what some people might be inclined to call a “whine.”

Drift looked like he wasn’t sure what to say to that, so Rodimus decided to just keep talking. The strategy had served him...eh, variably in the past, but he didn’t have many others to choose from. “What I wouldn’t give to switch this out for an easy vacation. Somewhere with sunlight where you can actually drive instead of all this effort.” He stabbed the ice in front of him with one of his ice axes, mostly just to be dramatic.

“If you didn’t want to be here then why did you come?” Drift was still behind Rodimus, following closely as they approached a daunting-looking wall of ice that there didn’t seem to be any way of going around.

“Because I wanted to hang out with you.” The words were out before Rodimus really knew what he’d said. He owned it, though, and waited for Drift’s response.

It was a few seconds before he risked even a look back at Drift. Drift’s expression was closed off, unreadable. Was he trying to think of a way to say that he hated spending time with Rodimus? That he too missed the way they used to be together and wanted to work on bringing it back? Something else? Something worse?

In the end, he didn’t respond at all. Their arrival at the wall of ice prevented him from having to. “We’re going to climb this,” Drift said. “We could use ropes, which’ll be safer but slower. How confident are you with those tools?”

“Very,” said Rodimus, which wasn’t true. Anything to avoid the slower option. “Want me to lead the way again?”

Drift shook his head. “You’ll want to go behind me, use the same holds I use. The most important thing is that you put the axes in where the wall is concave instead of convex, like here.” He jammed one axe sharply into the wall with a controlled but firm flick of his wrist. He pulled the axe back out, and Rodimus realized that he’d been too distracted by Drift’s graceful movements and the unfamiliar new colors of his plating to pay much attention to where Drift had stuck the axe, or why. He’d have to just play along as they ascended.

“Got it,” he said. He was abruptly reminded of the sword lessons Drift had been giving him, back before. Just a little, though. Those afternoons had been all warmth and light and touching and laughter, and tonight was darkness and silence and Drift standing so much further away than Rodimus wanted.

“Alright. Follow my lead.” Drift stuck one tool in the wall, then the other, and then followed with the foot spikes, which had two thick spikes right in front like sharp claws. Rodimus waited until he was a body length up the wall and followed.

It wasn’t so bad. He really felt like he was getting in the rhythm of it, and having to balance himself on the wall using his tools was tricky enough to distract him from the cold. He was almost feeling good when the strongest gust of wind he had felt yet hit and his axe swung wide. Scared of slipping again, Rodimus thrust it into the wall as hard as he could.

All that did was break off a huge chunk of ice, up to where Drift had both feet embedded.

Rodimus fell back on his other axe, but he could feel his grip slipping as the wind continued to push at him. Drift lost the battle against it first, scaping more ice off the wall as he tried to find a foothold, and then tilting back when the one axe that he had all his weight on finally slipped off the wall too. Seeing him fall was the final straw that caused Rodimus to lose his grip on his own axe and fall after him into the dark.

—

Drift managed to get his axes nestled in the snow, but they didn’t catch on anything that would slow his descent down the steep, icy mountain. Then a weight hit him, sending him tumbling—Rodimus had fallen too. Drift lost even the semblance of control and they somersaulted together down the mountainside.

Drift finally stopped rolling with a painful impact to his back. The force that he’d hit his helm with caused his optics to reset. He heard a grunt of pain from Rodimus and fought to get his optics back online.

Once he did, he stumbled to his feet even though it felt like the world was spinning. “Rodimus?” he asked. His voice came out gruff, but he pushed his own disorientation aside—it was Rodimus who was lying there clutching the sides of his helm, with an improbably huge icicle stuck through the side of his chest.

“Yeah.” Rodimus’s voice was nonchalant, betraying nothing about his situation. After a moment, he took his hands off his helm, which was stained pink like the ground beneath him. He looked up at Drift, optics narrowed with pain but clear. “GPS isn’t working. I don’t know if it’s me or the storm. I got off an emergency broadcast, though.”

“No one’s going to hear an emergency broadcast out here,” Drift said, not bothering to take in their surroundings. He knew them well enough—dark, uninviting, without a soul in sight.

“Not even the temple?”

“They don’t have the reception technology. Even if they did, the storm might be too much for it.” Drift tried to kneel next to Rodimus to look at his injury, but ended up sitting all the way down in the snow, too disoriented for anything more graceful.

It wasn’t good. The icicle was sticking up out of the ground, having clearly fallen from somewhere before the storm. Maybe long before. It was taller than Drift and stuck into the ground at an angle. Rodimus was on the ground at the bottom of it. The icicle had punched a hole through his chest, luckily not near his spark chamber. The leaking already seemed to be slowing, the wound cauterizing itself around the intrusion.

Drift took stock of things. The icicle was too thick for him to cut through with his axe, and he couldn’t risk hacking at it with a sword without risking hurting Rodimus worse. And it was way too tall for Drift to lift Rodimus off of it. He was trapped.

Drift pressed the heels of his hands to his optics in frustration. “You’re not going to like this,” he said.

“And here I was, thinking this was rock bottom already,” Rodimus said, his voice light enough that Drift had to smile, bad as this whole situation was.

“I can’t get you out of here. Not like this,” Drift said. “And anyway, it’s safer if that thing stays where it is. Otherwise you could bleed out.”

“Huh, you’re right,” Rodimus said, moving one arm so that it was holding up his head. “I do hate that.”

Drift knew what he needed to say next, but the words froze in his throat. He didn’t want to leave. He wanted to stay here with Rodimus, whose easy smile warded off the cold and whose jokes, which hadn’t stopped for a second even now, made him feel ten times stronger. Facing the mountain alone felt unbearable, now, when he knew that the alternative was having Rodimus’s light at his side.

And that was the whole point, wasn’t it? He’d wanted to go on this stupid, risky journey to prove that he didn’t need this. He’d wanted to remind himself that he could survive without anyone at his side. He’d wanted to know that he could carry on, as he’d done before and would, he was sure, have to do again. He’d wanted to stop falling into this calm, this peace, this... happiness that he’d let himself get so wrapped up in with Rodimus and the Lost Light crew. It had been what he was leaving behind more than the banishment itself that had nearly destroyed him back then.

 _Well, Drift, here’s your chance_ , he thought. _Do it. Prove you can_.

It was as bad as last time. Worse. “My GPS is down, too. I don’t know which way the Howling Town is. I could walk for days in the wrong direction and not be able to tell. No one’s going to find us out here. But I know that the temple’s at the summit.”

Rodimus seemed to realize what he was getting at, his optics widening. “You want to go up there alone? Now?”

Drift shuttered his optics. Maybe this would be easier if he pretended that Rodimus was already gone, that it was just Drift and the snow. “There’s no other choice.”

Rodimus was silent for so long that Drift had to open his optics to make sure he was still awake. “You could wait,” he said. “I sent out a transmission—”

“No one’s coming to save us,” Drift said. “You can’t bet that they will. Not ever.” He knew that Rodimus himself had seen too much to deny it. There was a time for optimism, and a time to face reality. No one Drift had ever known understood that as well as Rodimus did.

Rodimus’s hand darted out and caught Drift’s. Drift felt his optics widen as his head instinctively inclined to meet Rodimus’s gaze. “I don’t want this to be like last time,” Rodimus said.

Drift stared at Rodimus, almost unable to comprehend that. Rodimus was worried about old hurts, now, while lying there cold and _impaled_? But his hand was so tight on Drift’s.

“It isn’t,” Drift said, pushing his own trepidation about the climb ahead of him out of his mind and holding Rodimus’s hand with equal fierceness. “It’s only a few hours. If you can fall asleep, it’ll seem like no time.”

“You sure you’re okay to do this? You hit the ground pretty hard, too.”

“I’m good.” _I’ll have to be._

Drift made himself let go first. It was so much harder than it ought to be. Nothing I could’ve done on this shore leave would have helped anything. _I’m already way too far gone._

Rodimus slipped his hand away and Drift was left without any excuse to stay on the ground. He stood and picked up his abandoned axes. He appraised the slope in front of him. He’d done this before. Not in this weather, not off-trail, and not after a fall like that, but he’d done it. He could do it.

Rodimus might be his weakness, but right now he was counting on Drift. Drift would have to figure out a way to make that his strength.

“I’ll be back,” he said, trying to make it sound like he wasn’t feeling any doubt. He started to climb.

—

It felt like hours passed, but Rodimus’s chronometer said it was much less. The pain wasn’t the issue. As long as Rodimus lay still, and didn’t think about the giant icicle that was stuck in the middle of his chest, it was barely noticeable what with all the healing that his body had done with the icicle still fragging in there and _ow_ , yeah, continuing to not think about that was the best bet.

No, the problem was the boredom. There was nothing to look at here but the swirling snow, which was thick enough to hide the stars and even the clouds and got boring very, very fast. The only distraction from the boredom was worrying about Drift, which was also not fun at all. Drift, who had assured Rodimus that he wasn’t thinking of this like the time Rodimus had essentially abandoned him on purpose, who had still looked like someone whose spark was being torn out of his frame as he let go of Rodimus’s hand. Who was now out there alone in the storm, putting himself in danger for the sake of Rodimus’s life. Like before. Like always. Rodimus hated it.

 _Never again_ , he thought, as one of those worried tirades settled into fatigue _. I’m never doing this to him again. Never._

It was to that mantra, _never again. Never again. Never again_ , that Rodimus coaxed himself to sleep. He knew that he was only in real danger from the cold if he was left out there for much longer than Drift expected, and if he didn’t get medical attention after. Letting himself sleep was safe, and it would be a much much easier way of passing the time than boredom and pain and worry. He managed to lose track of time entirely.

He awoke to strangers’ voices. “I’ve got one over here! Right where the signal came from!”

Rodimus willed his optics open. Even though he’d only been in a light recharge, his body felt like it had been hit by ten trucks, the reason for which made itself known as he tried to orient himself toward the voices. _Oh yeah. Icicle. In my body. Right._

He lay his head back against the ground as one of the planes that had been circling above him floated down and transformed, his partner following close behind. “Glad we found you. What were you doing out in this weather?”

“Bad decisions,” Rodimus said, too tired for much else in the way of speech. Or movement.

“Well, I’m Blaze and my friend, Aerial here, is a medic. We’ll take care of you and get you somewhere warm,” he said. “But we’re gonna knock you out, first, okay? Otherwise getting you off this thing is going to be very painful for you.”

Rodimus nodded his consent, figuring that he might as well when he was pretty sure he was about to pass out again either way. He closed his optics before he felt the telltale sting of a syringe piercing a line in his elbow. He willed himself to sleep again, imagining that Drift would be by his side when he awoke.

-

Rodimus was warm. That was the first thing he noticed, and he took his time to relish it before moving on to perceive anything else. He hadn’t appreciated warmth enough, all those times he’d been warm in the past. He savored it now, drank it in until it felt like there was nothing else to him but the absence of cold.

Then the residual ache from the icicle that he hoped was no longer embedded in his frame edged its way into his perception, and regrettably, he could no longer delay opening his optics.

He was in a smallish hospital space—not as cramped as the ones on spaceships, nothing compared to the ones in battlefields or cities. There were a few berths to each side, but no one was occupying them. Aerial, the medic who’d helped Rodimus, walked through a door off to one side as Rodimus was surveying the room.

“How are you feeling?” Aerial asked, opening up a diagnostic display that Rodimus was connected to at the same time because apparently he didn’t trust Rodimus to answer the question accurately.

“Okay. Kinda cloudy,” he said.

“That’s just the sedative wearing off,” Aerial said. “That should go away in a few minutes.”

Aerial turned away from the diagnostic display and lifted a cover off of Rodimus’s chest. Rodimus looked down at it too, and was surprised to see that it had already been repaired, weld lines and a deep ache of ignorable intensity the only remaining evidence that the wound had ever happened. He checked his chronometer. It had been about five hours since he’d fallen asleep the first time—he hadn’t been aware enough to check what time it was when the medics had found him.

“Where’s Drift?” he asked after Aerial finished checking the wound and was reattaching the covering.

“Who?” Aerial asked, not looking up.

“Drift! He was the one who told you where to find me.”

Now Aerial looked at him, confused. “We received an emergency broadcast that appeared to have come from you.”

Rodimus’s jaw dropped. _Drift isn’t here_. “Where am I?”

“This is the medical center in the Howling Town at the base of Mount Kai.”

“No. It can’t be. I need to be at the top.”

“Okay, putting down delusions ...get some rest, I’m sure your friend’s around here somewhere,” Aerial said.

“You don’t understand, he was going to the summit—”

Aerial stopped what he was doing again and looked over at Rodimus. “The summit? In this weather? _Why_?”

Rodimus couldn’t even think of how to answer. _Never again. Frag it, the first thing I did was break that promise._ Rodimus was safe, and Drift was alone. Again.

—

Drift could feel the circulation to his feet and fingers cutting off as he approached the summit. That was annoying, but it wouldn’t be a medical issue unless it impeded his movement so much that he fell again. _And that cannot happen. Rodimus is counting on me_ , he said to himself, as he had over and over since leaving Rodimus impaled at the base.

He was almost there. This was the last stretch and the most dangerous, especially in this weather. It wasn’t a tall climb, but it was steep, and the lack of feeling in his hands and feet could mean that he wouldn’t be warned about an unstable hold.

 _Rodimus is counting on me. Rodimus is counting on me_. Those words, and the memory of Rodimus clutching his hand and staring into his optics were enough to power Drift to the top of the icy face.

And just to there. When he hit the flat of the summit, he dug one tool in and just stayed there, on his hands and knees, head spinning. He was low on fuel and his self-repair systems had given up on repairing the minor crushed circuits in his head and back with the strain and the cold.

After a brief break, he summoned the image of Rodimus into his mind again and he stood. The hard part may be over, but he couldn’t stop now.

It was only a few uncomfortable, limping minutes before the temple was in sight. It was dark, so he couldn’t see it until he was pretty close by. _That’s interesting_. Maybe they have some ritual for the storm. Drift didn’t spare too much thought to it, or to anything, until at last he was at the door and turning the handle, so glad he’d made it that for a second he was able to forget the discomfort.

He opened the door to nothing.

Well, not nothing. But more of the same. More cold, more ice, more darkness. He looked around frantically. The temple seemed to have lost a wall and half the ceiling, and what floor there was had been covered in snow and rubble. Drift looked at where there had once been an alter and was able to see pieces of it buried under ice and rock.

Drift shut the door behind him, as if that would help anything. There was no one here. No one to help him. No one to help Rodimus, and there was no way Drift could make the climb back down without passing out or falling, not without fuel and a place to warm up.

He stumbled to one of the remaining corners and sat. At least the wind couldn’t get to him here, even though the air was still bitterly cold. _You’re not helping your circulation by not moving_ , he tried to tell himself as he huddled in the corner, listening to the screams of the wind that given the Howling Mountains their name. But moving would just burn up fuel quicker, and it wasn’t like he could make it back to the base of the mountain safely no matter what he did from here.

He worked himself into a panic about Rodimus dying alone in the cold, as if that would magically increase his fuel levels or make his frozen limbs more functional. It just made him miserable.

He felt the rush of fatigue as his body started to give into the low fuel levels and the strain of the climb up here. He thought about fighting it. But the concept of standing up, of walking, of trying to get all the way back to the Howling Town or even to Rodimus, just made his body feel heavier, more stuck here. He didn’t notice when he gave in to sleep. _Stupid. Should never have let him come. Should never have let myself get attached._

—

Rodimus held on to the chain attached to Blaze with one hand and both of his ice axes with the other. They weren’t the ones he’d had before. One had been abandoned when he’d slipped off the icy face, and the other Blaze and Aerial hadn’t bothered to bring back from where Rodimus had been stuck, so he’d been able to talk them into giving him a new set. He was back out in the cold, but he had the memory of that delicious warmth to fall back on, and he knew that soon enough he would be warm again. He carried a pack full of blankets and energon rations as well as a mini medical kit.

“Approaching the drop zone, thirty seconds,” Blaze said to him, shouting through the storm.

Rodimus yelled back, hoping that Blaze could hear him despite the screaming wind and the speed at which they were flying. This had been harder to talk the planes into than the axes had been. But Rodimus knew that driving from the Howling Town and then climbing all the way up would take too long. Too long for what, Rodimus wasn’t sure. But he was willing to take this risk if it meant he got to Drift sooner. He wasn’t going to break his promise. He wasn’t.

“Five seconds,” Blaze said. Then, “Now.”

Rodimus released the chain, immediately going for one of the axes with his newly-freed hand. Blaze had dropped him pretty  close to the mountain’s surface, but everything depended on him being able to stop himself from falling. The summit was too bumpy for Blaze—or Rodimus—to land on safely, so this had been their compromise.

Rodimus hit the snow spikes and tools first, barely holding on as they dug into the ice and snow. After almost too long, he skidded to a stop on the side of the mountain, venting roughly, the effort and the shock letting him forget about the cold. After a moment, he started to climb.

He was tired, from the injury and the stress of the whole night, but he managed to push that aside. He kept track of where his foot spikes were, made sure to have solid holds on at least two limbs at a time, and made sure to stab the ice at _concavities_ , not convexities. Sometime between the fall and waking up at the med center, he’d realized that that had been his mistake.

Rodimus wasn’t a careful person. But he was careful now, because the stakes were too high for anything else. He had to get to Drift. He couldn’t break his promise.

Blaze, when Aerial had gone to get him after getting bored of answering Rodimus’s many, many questions, had told him that the temple they’d been seeking had been abandoned, about a year ago. It had been damaged in an electrical storm, and the weather hadn’t been good enough since then for anyone to go back and fix it. Information that Rodimus and Drift would have easily known, Blaze said with a hint of incredulity, if they had told absolutely anyone who lived on this planet where they were going.

Rodimus reached a flat spot, and paused for a second to rest. He grimaced as he looked up at the wall that he had to climb next. It was steep, and taller than anything he’d had to climb at once so far. He’d been able to see the top of the mountain for just a second, through the snow, as Blaze had flown him towards it—at least, he thought so. There was a small chance that that had been a conveniently shaped cloud, or something out of his imagination, and that he wasn’t close to the top at all.

 _If there’s a next one, then I’ll climb it_ , Rodimus told himself as he stuck his tool into a concavity. _And the next, and the next, and the next_.

He emerged to another flat, though this one was oddly rounded. And—he looked up and broke into a grin—nothing went up from here. The terrain was awkward and rolling, but he’d made it.

Almost.

He started walking on the bumpy, icy surface. He had to practically stomp for his foot spikes to dig in and keep him from slipping as he made his way toward the structure that was becoming clearer and clearer through the swirling snow and screaming wind. The snow was so thick that he couldn’t even tell if Drift had made it here, or maybe he’d left already—

Rodimus opened the door to the temple.

—

Drift floated in and out of consciousness, oscillated between oblivion and disgust at himself for getting into this situation. He wondered where the people he’d met at this temple were. He wondered if they were coming back, and then squashed that notion angrily. They weren’t coming back. No one was coming to save him. He either had to find a way out of this situation himself or he was going to die here.

And with the way things were going—fuel levels dwindling as he fought to stay online, numbness creeping further and further up his lines—it was looking like chances were swinging toward the latter.

This was exactly what he’d been afraid of. He’d been so distracted by Rodimus—by the issues between them, sure, but also just by the comfort of companionship, and by his stupid infatuation, all the energy he spent wondering what Rodimus was thinking, marveling in not knowing what he was going to do or say next. He would have done better without that. That was what this whole stupid trip was supposed to be about. He couldn’t afford to get lost in that. Life was too harsh for love.

He would have censored himself before thinking that word, if his mind was clearer. Now, he didn’t bother to deny it.  He didn’t have the strength. Love was the feeling that he was experiencing, the one that he had tried so halfheartedly to run away from. He loved Rodimus, and he loved the mission and the crew, and here it had brought him, freezing himself offline on top of an abandoned Howling Mountain.

At some point, his thoughts were so escapist and abstract that instead of going over the now-stale memory of Rodimus gripping his hand, his mind conjured a fantasy of Rodimus in the ruined temple with him. The hallucination still had a wound in its chest, fixed up with weld marks fresh and visible. It set a pair of ice axes down on top of the bits of rubble on the floor and shrugged a pack off of its shoulders. It took out a thermal emergency blanket, which it wrapped around Drift’s shoulders. Drift imagined that he could really feel the warmth of it.

“Drift?” The hallucination’s hand was on his shoulder, and it felt warm and steady and its grip was almost too tight. And his voice...it wasn’t reassuring, like Drift would have wanted it to be. It was worried.

Drift blinked. He willed his processor to a touch more alertness. Rodimus didn’t disappear. The warm weight on his shoulder stayed there. It wasn’t his imagination. It was real.

“You’re here?” Drift’s voice came out weak and unsteady.

At the acknowledgement, Rodimus drew Drift into a rough hug. “Yeah, I’m here.”

The contact was almost too much. Drift had been so convinced that he’d ruined everything, that he’d failed, but here Rodimus was, practically shining even in the darkness and holding Drift with a secure gentleness that he could have lost himself in forever.

Rodimus broke the embrace first. Drift was disappointed, but he let Rodimus pull away and rummage through the pack he’d brought. “How?” Drift asked.

Rodimus pulled out a cube of energon and handed it to Drift, who took it carefully in his still-numb hands. The blanket was helping a little, but it could only do so much with the air so bitterly cold.

“The Howling Town where we rented our gear heard my emergency transmission,” Rodimus said, watching Drift critically until he took a sip from the cube. “Even though you said they wouldn’t.”

“I didn’t know how far away we were,” Drift said. He could tell that his voice already sounded better.

Rodimus moved so that he was leaning against the wall next to Drift. Drift extended a corner of the blanket to him and he took it, scooching in so close that his shoulder was pressed up against Drift’s. The warmth emanating from his body helped more than the blanket. Or maybe that was just Drift’s reaction. “I know, I know, in tough situations you can’t trust anybody but yourself,” Rodimus said. “But being in command? Being captain? It’s taught me that sometimes you have to rely on people. Sometimes to their jobs, but sometimes just to be people. To be listening, when they know there are travelers out in a storm, and to come help them.”

Drift looked over at Rodimus, unimpressed. Good as it was to see him, this didn’t feel like the place for a pep talk, even though Drift would have listened to anything Rodimus said as long as he sat there, letting the heat of his body flow into Drift’s.

Rodimus didn’t wait for him to answer. “You’re not ready for that. That’s okay,” he said. “I’m going to prove it to you.”

Drift must have looked puzzled at that.

“I’m never leaving you behind again,” Rodimus said. “I don’t expect you to believe that right away, but it’s the truth. Things between us haven’t been the best—”

Rodimus didn’t seem like he was done talking, but looked over at Drift for a reaction. Drift shrugged, not wanting to commit to a no or a yes, not when he was so wrung out physically and emotionally already.

“And I realized, when you were doing the climb alone to get help for me, that I don’t want things to go back to the way things were. I thought I did, but...we both know how that ended. And like I said, that’s not going to happen again. So instead of trying to make things like before, I figure that things can be different, but just as good. Maybe even better.” Rodimus took the finished cube from Drift’s now-tingling hands. “Another?”

Drift shook his head no.

Rodimus set the cube off to the side and didn’t meet Drift’s optics again, suddenly shy. “What do you think about that?”

“I think that sounds really good,” Drift said. Cautiously, he lay his head on Rodimus’s shoulder. It wasn’t something he would have done before. He’d been trying too hard to be cool, to be in control, for that. He hadn’t wanted to be a person who needed comfort. But...if what Rodimus was saying was true, maybe he was allowed to need it. Maybe he really wasn’t on his own.

And maybe he’d feel differently if he wasn’t still at the top of a mountain in an abandoned temple in a storm, if Rodimus hadn’t just come out of nowhere to save him. But for now, he let himself need it. He let himself have it.

Rodimus put an arm around Drift’s shoulders, which felt so good that Drift couldn’t help but bury his face even further into Rodimus’s neck, a silly move to increase the contact between them.

“Here,” Rodimus said, removing his arm and moving away. Drift felt crushed, and inexplicably, unreasonably betrayed for the few seconds before he realized that Rodimus was rearranging the blanket and stretching out on the floor, gesturing for Drift to follow suit.

Drift did so without thinking. Rodimus draped the blanket back over both of them and reached his legs out to entwine them with Drift’s. Drift put his head down on Rodimus’s arm, which, to be fair, was _right there_ , and Rodimus put his other arm across Drift’s body.

Maybe he was dead. Maybe this was the Afterspark—the good one, which he didn’t really believe in, but other sects did. The one that some humans called _heaven_.

“Blaze, my new jet friend, he was telling me that the storm’s gonna let up by morning,” Rodimus said. “So I was thinking we could sleep for a few hours and then head back.”

Drift’s limbs were heavy on the floor of the temple, and his processor was very much in agreement. “Okay.” He left consciousness not thinking anything at all. Just feeling. Feeling Rodimus’s plating on his, feeling safe, feeling warm.

—

Rodimus woke to Drift already starting to move around. He blinked his optics on, disappointed that the temple was still dark. Of course, the sun never touched the far side. They’d have to climb down the mountain and take the transport from the Howling Town back to the near side marketplace before they encountered any real light.

It didn’t feel like an impossible prospect, though. Rodimus’s chest still ached a little from the wound, but the rest of him felt rested and calm.

He waited for Drift to finish waking up before moving. He wanted to get back to the ship and the mission, but a few more minutes of lying there, entwined on the dirty stone floor, wasn’t going to jeopardize that. Ultra Magnus would have planned on Rodimus being late anyway.

Drift opened his own optics and then blinked, as though he had to take a minute to reacquaint himself with his surroundings. “Hi,” he whispered.

“Hi,” Rodimus said, unable to stop his face from slipping into a grin. He pulled away to grab at his bag before doing something that he would really regret. That something being kissing Drift, when he’d just taken such a tiny and difficult step towards fixing things between them.

He took out two more cubes and handed one to Drift before taking a sip from the second. Drift sat up too and started folding the thermal blanket.

Drift didn’t say anything and the quiet felt achingly empty to Rodimus. He badly wanted to say something. But he couldn’t think of what, exactly, would be better than the quiet, so he didn’t. He drank his energon and packed up his gear and by the time he was done, the silence had settled into something different. Something that was calming instead of anxiety-inducing. _Things can be different_. He was going to prove it. Almost as much as he wanted to catch Getaway, he wanted to prove it. Maybe as much. Maybe more.

Climbing down was tricky, but as someone who’d been introduced to climbing in a snowstorm, Rodimus found it pretty simple. He was still careful, though. Even if he could swing his hands and feet pretty much anywhere and get a decent-ish hold, what he was doing was dangerous. He was accountable for his own safety, here—and Drift’s. That was scarier, and that was what kept him in line as they climbed and hiked their way down.

The best part of the descent was that it was fast. Rodimus had never actually climbed the whole mountain, but he bet that the climb down was way faster than climbing up.

Soon enough they were stopping, removing their crampons and starting to arrange gear for the drive back.

And Rodimus realized that he didn’t want to leave this place. He’d started something new here, but he didn’t know what that would look like back on the cramped quarters on Skip, with so many others so close by and this thing between him and Drift—changing the future—still so fragile and new. It may be dark here, and it may still be cold, but it was good. It was so good to be able to really talk to Drift, to take even the smallest little steps towards becoming...Rodimus didn’t even know.

“Is it weird that I don’t want to leave?” Rodimus asked, when he decided not to bother resisting the urge.

“Yes,” Drift said. “You were stabbed on this mountain.”

“Yeah, it was a sucky night, but...it was kind of nice, also,” Rodimus said, fastening his ice axes to the outside of his pack. “If you measure, you know, good and bad, I think it was worth it.”

Drift had stopped packing, and was just looking at him. “We’re not leaving this here,” he said. “I know you want to keep your promise, and...I want to try, too. I want to be a better friend. There was a lot wrong before, even before...you know.”

Drift’s face fell a little as the topic of his banishment came up, as it inevitably would have. But Rodimus had lost track at the word _friend_.

Promises aside, that wasn’t what Rodimus wanted. And it seemed like here, in the dark, at the base of this stupid mountain that had once contained a sacred place, was the place to voice it. He knew that no matter how much progress they made, a better time wouldn't come.

“Is that what you want? To be friends?” he asked. He braced himself for the answer to be yes. Drift and Ratchet were close, and Drift had lots of hangups and other deep thoughts that Rodimus knew he would never really understand, but that didn’t change the fact that he wanted to try. He wanted to know Drift inside and out, all of his worries, his regrets, his insecurities, as well as he’d learned the things that brought him joy. He wanted more nights like last night, preferably the words and the intimacy without the injuries and the storm.

Drift was silent for a moment. He seemed to be fighting some internal battle. Rodimus realized, then, that he was asking more than he’d thought. Drift had already admitted that he avoided trust, avoided reliance, avoided the kind of closeness that could end up hurting. And Rodimus was offering all those things and more.

He could tell, as the silence stretched, that Drift wanted to say yes. That Drift wanted what Rodimus wanted. But Rodimus didn’t know if he wanted it as much as he wanted to stay in his safe headspace, where no one close meant that no one could disappoint him. Rodimus wouldn’t blame him, if that were the case.

But Drift had made a decision last night, too. He wanted things to be different, too. And for him, hopefully that meant letting those stupid walls around him fall down.

“That’s not what I want,” Drift said finally. His voice was quiet, breathy, and his optics were wide, boring into Rodimus’s.

Rodimus took one step closer, and then with no effort they were in each other’s arms, and Drift was kissing him.

Rodimus shut his optics and blocked out everything but Drift. The cold and the dark were still around them, he knew, but there would be light again. There would be warmth again. And for now, they had each other.

 


End file.
